Listen, if you want to make it to supper you must come quickly but you’ll have to bring lots of money.
His nephew Jack who’s a helluva clever bugger, he’s on a lot of boards and chairman of this, chairman of that. Wonderful bugger, Jack. He still weighs 78kg same as he weighed when he was a fighter jet pilot (Jack must be 78yrs old in the shade).
He brought me some smoked snoek and chips, KILOGRAMS OF IT!
..
He’s on to food – a favourite subject.
..
Oupa worked on the railways.
Working men took a scoff box to work
Guys would take sarmies, meat, tea, etc.
Oupa had a billy can. A blue billy can, the lid was your cup. You know what he used to take in to work for his lunch?
No. What, Dad?
Sugar water
At night he’d drink a big mug of milk and eat bread.
..
Ouma would cook in the kitchen and dish up in the kitchen.
Six plates. Her and Oupa and four big kids.
You got your plate of food. Don’t ask for more, there was no more. But we didn’t need more, it was a great big plate; we never went hungry. We had to do without some stuff, like new clothes or shoes, but we never went hungry.
..
Oupa and Ouma in PMB
Chickens and muscovy ducks in the backyard.
Ouma made a little pond in the ‘sump,’ the lowest point in the yard in the far corner. She would fill it up with water, about one brick deep, then throw mielies in the water. The ducks like feeding underwater. They bred prolifically and there were always plenty. A big fat roast duck was a huge treat. Only trouble is there was duck shit all over the yard.
Chickens they had to slag. The kids. One would hold the beak and feet, stretch it and one would chop off the head with an axe.
A big game was to then stand it up and let it go and watch it run around, headless.
‘One day Oupa caught us doing it and beat the shit out of us.’
Mom Mary Swanepoel made costumes for a fancy dress event in the Harrismith town hall ca.1959. We were living on a plot Birdhaven in the shadow of Platberg just a kilometre east of the edge of town on the forestry road.
Some thirty years later, big sister Barbara in the middle on the left, made costumes for her kids Linda and Robbie in a re-enactment ca.1986. They were living on a farm Shukela Estates outside Greytown.
– three of us kids ca.1959 and then Barbara’s two kids ca.1986 –
At the time our Oupa was visiting us from Pietermaritzburg. Paul Fouche Swanepoel, grandpa of Peter Frank – me.
– early 20th century ballroom trousers on the old PF – shorts on the new PF –
~~~oo0oo~~~
Now we await Linda’s move – I’ll bet she’ll repeat the re-enactment with her two, Mary-Kate and Dawie VII – they’ll be third generation ‘gypsies.’
After Maritzburg College, Dad joined the General Post Office as an apprentice electrician. Around 1st April 1938. Here’s a spirit level he was issued that day:
– Spirit level – Wilson Lovatt & sons Wolverhampton –
While he was still apprenticing, he tried to enlist to join the WW2 war effort, but was sent back. He was transferred to Harrismith, from where he again made his way to Durban and was sent home again, finally being allowed to join after Oupa gave his reluctant blessing. He left for ‘up north’ in 1941.
While in Harrismith ca.1940, he met old Mr Buckle the Blacksmith down in McKechnie street, near the railway station. He was from England.
He ended up with a few tools from old man Buckle: a back saw and a set square with a beautiful brass inlay and brass leading edge.
Dad stayed on a plot outside town – townlands – and bought horses, schooled them and sold them for a profit. I assumed he’d had them shod by Buckle but he corrected me. Buckle was a blacksmith, upholsterer, wheelwright and wainwright/wagon-maker. He didn’t shoe horses. That was up to Charlie Rustov, Harrismith’s only farrier.
From his plot on townlands out west of town** he would ride out to Boschetto Agricultural College for Ladies on the slopes of Platberg, the mountain that dominates the town. Boschetto was where the girls were. The first time he went he met the formidable Miss Norah Miller, the founder and principal. Luckily for him she needed something done, he was able to help and so became a firm favourite of hers from the outset.
While he was telling the story Mom remembered a story about Norah: She knocked on someone’s door. Whoever answered went back and was asked ‘Who was there?’
They said, I don’t know, but she’s got one eye, one leg and a hell of a cough! Norah had one lens of her glasses frosted out, she wore a leg brace (probably childhood polio?) and smoked like a chimney. When her leg brace buckled, Dr Frank Reitz made her a new one. A better one. He would have loved that challenge. He was a hands-on fixer.
~~~oo0oo~~~
Harrismith author Leon Strachan found some fascinating info on Norah Miller’s leg – it was not polio. His source, Isobel Kemp (Dr Frank Reitz’s receptionist for thirty years. Isobel knew everything): It was probably osteoporosis resulting in a hip fracture in 1928, only six years after she established her college. Usually this would have resulted in incapacity and excruciating pain, but Norah was in luck: she was in the right place at the right time, and knew just the right man, bold innovator and pioneering surgeon Frank Reitz, trained at Guys Hospital in London, then did surgery specialisation in Germany.
He operated and joined the femur using an ordinary screw to hold the femur ends together! This trick would only become common decades later, in the fifties. Thirty years later she was still walking – with difficulty, but still mobile, and in charge of her college. When Cedara took over Boschetto she moved there, where she died in 1959, aged 79.
~~~oo0oo~~~
Aug 2021: Ole man phoned me. He found some (one? more? maybe the one I photographed above?) old ‘tri-squares’ with handles made of ebony with brass inlay. Do I want them? I bought them in the late 40s and Buckle was already an old man, maybe eighty. So they are probably 100yrs old. Hell yes, I’d like to have them!
~~~oo0oo~~~
** Old man bought his first townlands from old Englishman Bill Mundy. On the right bank of the Wilge river downstream from town; out on the road that turns south towards Swallow Bridge after leaving the west edge of town below 42nd Hill.
Mom & Dad went to Lourenco Marques in Mocambique for their honeymoon in 1951.
With cars being very scarce after the war, Dad looked around for anything he could afford. He found a Mr Smith selling a fifteen year old Hudson Terraplane 4-door for £100. It came with a spare engine in the boot – and the feeling that it would probably be needed.
But it made it to LM – and back. Mom had to put her feet on the seat – the floor got too hot, even with shoes on. While in Lourenco Marques the Hudson started missing so Dad took it to a garage but the Portuguese owners couldn’t understand him. He tried Italian, which he’d learnt in the war. “Candela?” – Ah! Candela! Yes, they had sparkplugs and they could sort him out.
They stayed in a boarding house a couple blocks back from the seafront. ‘It was cheaper than a hotel’. While there they met with Frank Cabral a big game hunter married to some relative of Mom’s. They swam – Mom remembers the huge beach and the shallow sea with only tiny waves. They had fish for breakfast one morning – a whole fish whose eye gazed balefully at Mom, spoiling her appetite.
– they went to a bullfight – – detail from the signed matador cloth / scarf –
Outside the zoo Dad bought six parakeets or lovebirds with red faces. He made a cage for them and as they approached the border he hid it behind the large Hudson cubbyhole – there was plenty of space under the dashboard. So he’s a smuggler.
On the way back they went through Kruger Park and Mom distinctly recalls feeling very uncomfortable at how flimsy the reed walls of the park huts at Skukuza seemed when she thought of the wild animals outside! They went to visit an old friend of Dad’s, Rosemary Dyke-Wells, an old Boschetto agricultural college girl who was married to a game ranger there. He was the son of the famous Harry Wolhuter.
Montrose Falls in the lowveld
~~~oo0oo~~~
The Kruger Park was opened to tourism in 1927 and after a slow start – only three cars entered the Reserve in that first year – soon turned into a popular destination. Within a decade, 3600 kilometres of roads had been built and several camps established. In 1935, some 26,000 people passed through the gates. By 1950 a research station and rest camp had been developed at Skukuza, transforming Stevenson-Hamilton’s base into the “capital” of Kruger.
Some Kruger Park pics from the later fifties – 1956 to 1958:
~~~oo0oo~~~
Later back in Harrismith when the clutch packed up Dad found out the Hudson had a cork clutch. He bought dozens of cork medicine bottle tops from the chemist and hammered them into the angled holes set in concentric circles in the clutchplate, then cut the protruding parts off as level as he could and it worked again.
When it came time to sell it he can’t remember who he sold it to and for how much, but he does remember Pye von During would pay £25 for them and convert them into horse carts.
Years later they came across one at a vintage car show. Dunno when this was, but this year they’ll be married 67 years (2018).
1936 Hudson Terraplane
~~~oo0oo~~~
Soon after this the Post Office moved Dad back to Pietermaritzburg following a back injury. They stayed in the Creamery Hotel – ‘a dive, but cheap’. They moved to the slightly better (but ‘very hot in the afternoon’ – Mom) Windsor Hotel. Mom took a sewing course at ‘the tech’ while pregnant and then, just before first child Barbara was born they moved in with Ouma Swanepoel in Bourke Street in downtown PMB. Mom gave birth at Greys Hospital in mid-summer, 7th January, then came home to Ouma. Mom remembers the Bourke street home being beautifully cool.
Somewhere before or after, they stayed in Howick, in The Falls Hotel.
~~~oo0oo~~~
First ‘date’
Annie came to Mom and said ‘Peter Swanepoel has tickets to the Al Debbo concert in the Town Hall, would you like to go?’ He sat between Mom and Annie in the upstairs stalls, and ‘that was the beginning of their romance’ says Mom.
Al Debbo around then – 1949
~~~oo0oo~~~
An old LM citizen spotted this post and used the pic of Mom & Dad sitting on the seawall in his blog here – but first he deftly tidied it and colorised it. It looks terrific! Thanks Antonio!
2021 update: They hit 70yrs marriage – platinum! Well done Ma! You deserve a medal!
She actually did. My sister Barbara’s granma lived at 131 Boom Street Pietermaritzburg.
Right across the road was this school. Going to the Afrikaans school would have meant a bus ride, and Oupa was frugal.
And so started the ver-engels-ing of Dad. The rooinek-erisation. Pieter Gerhardus became ‘Peter’.
~~~oo0oo~~~
*ver-engels – Anglicisation
*rooinek – Boer word for Poms – anyone from ‘England’ – any of those islands left of France. Literally ‘red necks’ – but not American rednecks. NB: This excluded those Irishmen who fought for the Boers against the plundering, wicked, invading, looting Poms. Even though Irishmen can have very red necks.
~~~oo0oo~~~
From here (the way I understand it) they all went to Havelock Road Primary; Yanie the oldest went on to matriculate at Girls High; Lizzie the second child went on to Russell High School adjacent to the little school across the road, leaving in Std 8 to go and work; Boet finished Std 6 at Havelock Road and got his first job at Edel’s Shoe Factory, his second in Howick at Dunlop. On the way back one day he crashed his motorbike and injured himself badly. Lizzie arranged a bursary for Dad the youngest to go to Maritzburg College where he left in April in his matric year to join the post office as an apprentice electrician.
– a pre-school, a primary school and three high schools – click to enlarge –
Vrystaat Confessions 